Headlines

The European Parliament on Wednesday backed €2 million in EU aid for workers laid off after the bankruptcy of Liberty Steel Belgium, according to a press release. MEPs endorsed a Commission proposal to mobilise €2 million from the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund for Displaced Workers (EGF) to support 507 workers who lost their jobs following the bankruptcy of Liberty Steel Belgium, a manufacturer of basic metals, in April 2025. The report passed with 586 votes in favour, 48 against, and 16 abstentions.

Annual inflation in the 21 countries that use the euro rose to 3.0% from 2.6% in March, driven by a 10.9% increase in energy prices, the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat reported on Thursday, Euronews.com reported. Among the main components, energy recorded the highest annual increase in April at 10.9%, compared with 5.1% in March. This was followed by services at 3.0% (down from 3.2%), food, alcohol and tobacco at 2.5% (up from 2.4%), and non-energy industrial goods at 0.8% (up from 0.5%). Prices across Europe have been fuelled by soaring energy costs due to the Iran war.

Major central banks left interest rates unchanged this week but warned that they could raise them soon to prevent a jump in energy prices, caused by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, spilling over into a surge in broader inflation, Reuters reported.

The Bank of England kept interest rates on hold on Thursday and set out scenarios for the economic impact of the Iran war, one of which could require a "forceful" increase in borrowing costs, Reuters reported. The Monetary Policy Committee's nine members voted 8-1 to keep ​the BoE's benchmark Bank Rate at 3.75% with only Chief Economist Huw Pill seeking a hike to 4.0% now. A day after U.S. Federal Reserve kept rates on hold and shortly before the European Central Bank was expected to stay on hold too, the MPC said it would continue to monitor closely the situation in the Middle East.

Statistics Canada says real gross domestic product rose 0.2 per cent in February, but there were early signs the economy might have stalled to close out the first quarter of the year, Bloomberg News reported. The agency says economic growth in the month was led by a 1.8 per cent gain in the manufacturing sector, marking its fastest pace of growth in more than three years.

The European Union and South American bloc Mercosur will implement on Friday a contentious free trade agreement that ​the EU in particular hopes will benefit exporters and calm critics, even if it cannot fully offset the blow from U.S. tariffs, Reuters reported. Backers including ‌Germany and Spain say the agreement will help compensate for the hit from U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs and reduce reliance on China for critical minerals.

Taiwan’s economy expanded at its fastest pace in 39 years, supercharged by demand tied to artificial intelligence, despite lingering risks from the Middle East conflict threatening to halt that momentum, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product expanded 13.69% in the January-March quarter from a year earlier, advance estimates showed on Thursday. Exports of goods and services rose 35.25% in the first quarter, supported by AI demand.

The United Arab Emirates’ decision to withdraw from OPEC did more than deliver a shock to the cartel that has long ruled the global oil market. It also rang the opening bell for the new geopolitical order that the war with Iran is ushering in across the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new alignment is redrawing political fault lines between the Arab world and Israel that defined the region for decades.

Decentralized finance is in the midst of the largest coordinated rescue in its history, an effort marked by moral hazard concerns and ad-hoc negotiations that sit awkwardly with the sector’s founding pitch as a disruptor of traditional finance, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. A week after a security breach at a small crypto protocol called KelpDAO triggered a $10 billion run on Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol, the platform’s founder and a coalition of allied crypto projects are working to restore liquidity. Their goal is to let users withdraw funds and unwind positions.

Australia's financial system regulator said on Thursday the country's banks were not keeping pace ‌with AI industry developments, warning frontier AI systems such as Anthropic's Mythos had the potential to lead to larger and faster cyber attacks, Reuters reported. In a letter to banks, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) said most of the industry's information security practices were struggling to match the rate of ​change in AI. The regulator said the speed of AI development could pose a growing threat to Australia's financial ​services.